Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at MIT, a Thousand Talents Program Professor at Tsinghua University, and co-founder of the Presencing Institute. He also chairs the MIT IDEAS program for cross-sector innovation in China and Indonesia. He is author of Theory U and co-author of Presence and Leading from the Emerging Future. In 2015 he co-founded the MITx u.lab, a massive open online course that has generated a vibrant global eco-system of profound societal innovation and personal renewal. The u.lab attracted more than 75,000 registered users from 185 countries in its first year.
Otto earned his diploma (with distinction) and PhD (summa cum laude) from Witten/Herdecke University in Germany. He received the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching at MIT (2015) and the EU Leonardo Corporate Learning Award for the contributions of Theory U to the future of management and learning (2016). In 2016 he was also named one of the world's top 30 education professionals by globalgurus.org.
